Published Sep 18, 2026, 11:25 PM EDT
Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he’ll watch anything once. He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
Do you know what unites Orson Welles, David Lynch, Sidney Lumet, and Jordan Peele? Each of them made their directorial debuts with movies that are now considered all-time classics. More recently, this list can easily be expanded to include** Ari Aster**, Celine Song, Charlotte Wells, and Emerald Fennell. However, one filmmaker is often overlooked in discussions on this topic, or, on other occasions, is treated like a token candidate from an exotic foreign land. The filmmaker in question made his directorial debut in 1955, and his work has been hugely influential on the careers of directors such as Wes Anderson. His first movie was also the first installment of a trilogy, and it is currently streaming in the United States on HBO Max.
However, those who haven’t yet seen it may want to hurry, as it will soon be removed from the platform. The film is largely credited for introducing global audiences to arthouse Indian cinema, a far cry from the more colorful Bollywood movies that traveled across the world. It was directed by the great Satyajit Ray, a pioneer of the “parallel cinema” movement in India who worked predominantly in the Bengali language. He won an honorary Oscar before his death in 1992, and was hugely influenced by the Italian neorealist movement. His 1955 classic borrowed elements from Italian neorealism but filtered them through a uniquely lyrical lens.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
We’re talking, of course, about Pather Panchali, the first in Ray’s Apu Trilogy, which also includes Aparajito and Apur Sansar. A drama about the realities of life in rural India, the movie now holds a “Certified Fresh” 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The aggregator website’s consensus reads, “A film that requires and rewards patience in equal measure, Pather Panchali finds director Satyajit Ray delivering a classic with his debut.” While honoring Ray at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025, Anderson — his lifelong fan — said in an interview, “I watched (Ray’s 1961 title) Teen Kanya first, just because it happened to be available in a video store in Texas. That’s how I became interested in his films. I saw images from Ray’s work and thought, ‘That’s the way I want to be.’” *Pather Panchali *will be available on HBO Max until September 30. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.